In enterprise business, the importance of information technology (IT) is ever increasing. Large enterprise organizations rely more and more on robust technology products and related services to support their businesses. Over the past several decades, a large consulting services industry has developed to support and service these large enterprise organizations. Typically, consulting organizations apply one model in executing consulting services. This model involves top-performing, senior level consultants developing customer service partnerships with large enterprise organizations. The senior level consultants leverage a large number of junior consultants to design IT solutions. This model, however, is not easily scalable, it is labor intensive and thus expensive, and does not guarantee quality results. In addition, consulting organizations attempt to leverage previous solutions, developed for other customers, as a means for raising profit margins. This approach leads to non-differentiated solutions which partially address core problems of the enterprises.
Enterprise organizations seek the assistance of consultants to identify, analyze, and solve complex business problems. Complex business problems, as the name suggests, can be extremely complex, and result from various factors. For instance, complex business problems can arise from a series of business changes, rapid growth of businesses, technology changes, and/or technological limitations.
Enterprise organizations, who understand their businesses to a greater extent than consulting firms, desire a collaborative approach in which the enterprise organizations and consulting firms work closely to develop creative business solutions for complex problems. Accordingly, it can be beneficial to leverage business knowledge, held by the enterprise organizations, to immerse a team of consultants into the problems faced by the enterprise organizations in order to develop effective solutions.
One possible immersion mechanism is “serious” games. Serious games can encompass many forms and subject matters and teach players information relating to education, health, science, law and government, computers, and/or a multitude of other subjects. Typically, computer games are designed for entertainment purposes. However, with serious games, the goal is to train and educate players through a planned curriculum and set of objectives. Players can learn new material in a fun, educational environment. Conventional serious games, while challenging, are not aimed at real-life business problems nor provide clear problem statements and solutions which can be implemented by enterprise organizations. Rather, conventional serious games are designed to look at societal weaknesses and/or extreme world disaster scenarios in the world and in the future without regard to the existence of workable solutions.
Another challenge with consulting services and immersion mechanisms arises due to the sheer complexity of problems faced by enterprise organizations. For example, complex problems can involve vast amounts of data which can require research and analysis by a wide array of experts to comprehend the complex situations presented by the complex problems and any possible implications. Enterprise organizations can spend countless hours building data portfolios containing details which summarize the what, why, when, where, who, and how of a complex business problem. After data compilation, experts read, parse, review, and absorb all the information in order to develop a reasonable problem statement.
Reviewing volumes of data takes time and money due to people researching and creating systematic approaches to reduce the volumes of data into a reasonable problem concept. In a specific example, enterprise organizations, experiencing complex problems, assemble information around the problem areas in order to understand the complexities of the issues. To facilitate dissemination and comprehension of the information, the enterprise organizations can contextualize, clarify, simplify, and synthesize the information around the problem. One way to facilitate understanding of a problem is to provide contextual data. While contextual data is difficult to explain, ethnographic portrayals and interviews through video footage simulate contextual data such as culture, customs, language, terminology, and specific environments utilized in settings of enterprise organizations.
After recording video interviews, numerous hours can be spent by researchers to review the video. However, a portion of the information captured within a video clip can be insignificant. For instance, portions of the video footage can include dead spaces or transitions during which a video recorder continues to run. While such portions can be edited, e.g., removed, a lot of the remaining information in the video footage can bear little relevance to the complex problems of enterprise organizations. Accordingly, even when edited, large amounts of video footage can be unruly to review, parse, and analyze.
The above-described deficiencies of conventional consulting solutions and video viewing systems are merely intended to provide an overview of some of the problems of conventional systems and techniques, and are not intended to be exhaustive. Other problems with conventional systems and techniques, and corresponding benefits of the various non-limiting embodiments described herein may become further apparent upon review of the following description.